What the ‘limits of DNA’ story reveals about the challenges of science journalism in the ‘big data’ age

By: | April 6, 2012

As a science journalist, I sympathize with book reviewers who wrestle with the question of whether to write negative reviews. It seems a waste of time to write about a dog of a book when there are so many other worthy ones; but readers deserve to know if Oprah is touting a real stinker.

On 2 April, Science Translational Medicine published a study on DNA’s shortcomings in predicting disease. My editors and I had decided not to cover the study last week after we saw it in the journal’s embargoed press packet, because my sources offered heavy critiques of its methods. But it was a tough choice: we knew the paper was bound to get a lot of other coverage, as it conveyed a provocative message, would be published in a prominent journal, and would be highlighted at a press conference at the well-attended annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. Its lead authors, Bert Vogelstein and Victor Velculescu of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, Maryland, are also leaders in the cancer genetics field.

I ended up writing about the paper anyway after it made a huge media splash that prompted fury among geneticists. In a thoughtful post at the Knight Science Journalism tracker, Paul Raeburn asked yesterday why other reporters didn’t notice the problems with the study that I wrote about. Having been burned by my own share of splashy papers that go bust, I think the “limits of DNA “ story underscores a few broader issues for our work as science journalists:

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Snail Season: The San Fran Remix

By: | April 5, 2012

When Cameron delivered the last word on brown garden snails on Monday — great, biblical swarms of the things — I knew I’d have to respond, and visually too, since she said it all so well. I do battle with the demon mollusks a few hundred miles north of Cameron’s besieged garden, as the images above attest. I don’t know whether we’ve got quite the volume of the creatures she gets, but there have been nights when I’ve captured a kilogram’s-worth or more. Like Cameron, I can’t quite bring myself to eat them, though I know they are fed on the finest organic greens and seedlings. But I’m not so gentle as she when it comes to relocation — mine go straight into the home compost pile, so I’m getting their nutrients one way, if not the other.

When I first encountered the snails a few years ago, I was delighted and mesmerized. But as their numbers increased with the spring rains, the shoots and leaves in my garden disappeared and the slime trails on the patio multiplied into superhighways, my joy turned to concern, and concern first to horror and then, finally, to grim deadly determination. I am heartless now in my persecution of the snails — I have become hardened, numb to the brutality I mete out most every night. I have lost a part of my soul, in other words, but I have gained a whole world of salad. We all must live with the bargains we make. Continue reading →

Censorship at the Great Firewall

By: | April 4, 2012

If you were sitting in front of a computer in China right now, you wouldn’t be reading this. Nor would you have seen Cameron’s post about a snail invasion on Monday or Michelle’s piece yesterday on a poem inspired by Marie Curie. In fact, when you tried to open our website, your computer would have heaved and roiled and finally timed out. After several tries, you would have likely concluded that we had server problems and eventually crossed us off your list.

That’s exactly what the government of China wanted. Currently, the Last Word on Nothing.com is persona non grata in China, blocked from its millions of computers. The country’s Great Firewall—the massive internet censorship operation masterminded by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing—has risen up against us and struck our website down. Continue reading →

An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman

By: | April 3, 2012

There are poems about science. There are poems about scientists. But I know of only two poems about women scientists — about women doing science, that is — and both were written by the same person: the brilliant, defiant, influential poet Adrienne Rich, who died last week at the age of 82.

From “Power“:

Today I was reading about Marie Curie
she must have known she suffered    from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years    by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
The source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin    of her finger-ends
til she could no longer hold    a test tube or pencil
She died    a famous woman    denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

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Snail Season

By: | April 2, 2012

It is springtime, and the snails are upon us. They are upon the lemon leaves, and the stucco walls, and the umbrella stand. Somehow, they are upon the closet doors, which happen to be inside the house. They are upon the roof rack of the car as it travels six hundred miles north to Mount Shasta, and they emerge unscathed.

Beware the person who steps barefoot into the grass at midnight. The ten yards to the bathroom now seems much preferable to the sickening crunch of a shell beneath the heel.

This is the first place I’ve lived that had so many snails. During the first few years in this house, I heard an odd sound at night, a cross between a scratch and a squeak.

One rainy evening, I looked up. Dozens of snails slid along the greenhouse that shelters our dining room table. (The greenhouse is the addition of the man who lived here previously. I have been to his new house, where he installed an even larger one, facing west. Ours, a prototype, is south-facing, and in the winter it is lovely and warm. In the summer, it is hot.)

The brown garden snail lays as many as 80 eggs a month, and can breed six times each season. No wonder it feels as if we’re being overrun. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Dangerous

By: | March 30, 2012

I was going to explain the connection between gravity, general relativity, and time.  But I understand less than half of it and anyway, that’s not what our boy AG is really talking about here.   He’s talking about coming to grand conclusions based on understanding less than half of something.  And the guy he’s quoting, Alexander Pope, says that better than I can. Continue reading →

Correcting Hollywood Science: The Microexpressions of Mike Daisey Edition

By: | March 29, 2012

This past weekend I spent too many hours on Netflix watching Lie to Me, the Fox television drama that ran from 2009 to 2011. It’s a crime procedural (my favorite genre) about Dr. Cal Lightman, a psychologist who can spot liars by analyzing their body language and super-fast facial ticks, called microexpressions.

On the show, Lightman’s obsession with faces stems from a decades-old film of his mother recorded by her therapist. She had been institutionalized for depression, but on the film, she tells the therapist how good she feels after treatment, and how she longs to see her children. The therapist is convinced, allows her to go home, and she promptly commits suicide. After years of analyzing the footage, Lightman discovers that his mother’s face had shown flashes of agony while she lied about her happiness. He goes on to create a system for coding subtle facial expressions and launches a consulting firm, The Lightman Group, that helps police (and all sorts of other clients) detect when individuals are lying, and why.

It’s one of those shows that sticks with you, or with me, anyway. For the past few days I’ve been surreptitiously scrutinizing the faces of everyone I see—people exchanging small talk at a birthday party, people telling outrageous true stories on stage, my longtime friends, even my fiancé. Could I discover their hidden feelings just by paying closer attention? It’s tricky, of course, when you don’t know if someone is lying. But what about when you do know, like in the sad case of Mike Daisey?

Yesterday I hatched a plan: Learn the basics of the real science behind Lie and Me, then watch a bunch of old Daisey clips on YouTube and root out the signs of his deception.
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